International Journal of Commerce and Management Research

Design/Methodology/Approach: Electrical Industry has its root in engineering industry. The study is based on literature review pertaining to supply chain practices in engineering industry and its nature in electrical industry. It further aims at finding out the areas in which research is required. 

Findings: Engineer to Order (ETO) products by nature are driven by specific industrial customer needs and have peculiarities of specific design. Electrical industry, subset of engineering industry, essentially serves power generation, transmission and distribution and hence is driven by economy and vision of the nation. A typical product in electrical industry e.g. generators, turbines, transformer, switchgear- protection equipment has a lead time of 16-18 months and involves lot of stakeholder in making final product. Hence it is interesting to study supply chain practices in this industry. The literature review done in this paper brings out the fact that not much knowledge base is available to understand the supply chain practices in the field of electrical industry particularly in Indian scenario. It also clearly brings out the fact that role of SME’s in the value chain is entirely missing or not documented.

Research Limitations / implications: This paper explores the availability of literature in the area of supply chain practices of electrical industry. As a conclusion it gives further direction where research in Indian context should be focused. It is not a research to prove any hypothesis.

Practical implications: Although supply chain management is getting prime importance in today’s business world, penetration of best practices is far away from reality. While the intent of SME’s is always to adopt good practices, they are so much bogged down by their day to day activities and confined by limited resources that SCM participants at the far end of the value chain do not add much value thereby losing the rigor of value chain.